


Restoration

by JaqofSpades, lodessa



Category: Revolution (TV), The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, and this has haunted us for years now, because Billy Burke was born to play Harry Dresden
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 17:00:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9558566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades, https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: The power went out.  The world fell apart.  He and Bass tried to fix it, and made an even bigger mess.  That’s the story, right?  (Well, the PG-rated version, anyway.)But these dreams.  They’re tearing him apart, screaming at him to wake up, to remember, that there’s something he’s forgotten. Something important.  Gotta be his guilty conscience acting up, but … if they are just dreams, why are they leaving scars on his body?  And who the hell is Harry Dresden?He’s got a suspicion.  A fucking awful one.  This Dresden character doesn’t need a gun or sword to wreak havoc - dude throws fireballs - but the feeling’s the same.  The satisfaction.  The thrill of pure power.He thinks … it’s time to stop fucking thinking.Words like magic are not in his damned vocabulary.  He’s not back together with Bass.  He hasn’t turned his sweet niece into a soulless killer just like them. (Just for them.)There has to be a line somewhere, and this is his.Or his name’s not Miles Matheson.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Our thanks to Claire/blonde-not-blind on Tumblr for reading this and telling us that it mostly makes sense :D

Running.  His muscles burn as if he’s been running forever, but the call sounds again and his body hurtles forward with the rest. The dogs clamoring around him … not just dogs, some smartass part of him corrects, hounds, massive, impossibly huge hounds … run faster, tireless, doomed to run until they die. So is he, he realises, looking down at his feet. They are not feet.  They are paws.

He yanks his head up, resisting his powerlessness, then comes face to face with an incredibly fluffy specimen completely unlike the rest, bounding along beside him almost joyously.  A surge of warmth and reassurance flows through him at the sight: he’s protected.

Then the hairy giant vanishes and he’s lost in a wave of blood, rivers of it pouring down the grooves of a pyramid. He’s himself again, paws traded for size elevens and a staff that fits perfectly into his oversized palm, as much a part of him as each of his fingers. He brandishes it and fire erupts in front of him, burning a path through the hungry shadows lurking in the darkness.

Their screams fill the night, his vengeance remorseless and horrifically effective.   In the distance, her laughter is cutting them to pieces, a thousand shards of ice spearing his skin and a cold hand closing around his heart, claiming it.  She forces it to beat to a rhythm of her choosing, forces him to dance like a puppet.  But he won’t be anyone’s puppet.

“No! I won’t!  No!”

Miles pushes the bag down, then pulls it up around his ears.  Drowns in rivers of his own sweat, and probably more than a little blood.  He knows he’ll be pockmarked with the evidence of this encounter tomorrow - cuts and bites and bruises, every single one a new, impossible scar.  Fear and regret lodge in his throat, choking him, until he can’t contain them any longer.

He shudders into wakefulness, one hand groping for his sword, the other flung out to ward off … something.  Them.  It.  He has no idea, just the words singing in his brain: forzare and something and something.   But there’s an absence there, a wrongness, and he shudders and shakes and reaches and reaches, but … finds nothing.  Somehow, that’s the real horror in the night.

“You okay, Miles?”

A warm hand stroking his belly, knuckles brushing his flaccid cock.  The loving touch stings like a whiplash.  No, Bass.  I’m not okay, he panics.  You are not okay.  We are not okay.

But the dream is lurking still, trying to drag him back, and he grabs at it, that warm hand, the whiskey breath on the back of his neck. One nightmare for another, his brain complains fuzzily, and it’s Scranton, and Trenton, and Baltimore now, just as bloody, just as much pain, but at least it makes **sense**. Sort of.

Not even six months since they last tried to kill each other, and here they are again, Matheson and Monroe, back on their own private juggernaut of love and hate, life and death, loyalty and betrayal.  Whether he’s driving it or just being dragged along, he doesn’t know; some days, when Bass is pure heat at his back and Charlie’s sword is flashing next him, he can’t bring himself to care.

Charlie, he thinks, clawing his way out of the haze.  Charlie!

The thought of her galvanises him like nothing else - Ben’s little girl, all puppylike enthusiasm and soft heart, right up to the moment when she draws her swords.  Then she’s pure Matheson, matching him blow for blow, his partner in every step of the only dance he gives a damn about: raw carnage. She can change his mood with a single smile, his glorious niece; her battle cry makes him fucking invincible.  

And she’s the only thing stopping him from surrendering to the fight of his life.  Bass.  Best friend, worst enemy, the person he learnt to dance with in the first place.  Such familiar steps, this endless feedback loop, the constant churn of I love you and I hate you and I’ll kill for you and I’ll die for you, til death do us part.  

And they need Bass, they do, even Charlie sees that.  Together, they’re the best killing machine there is.  Even if she looks at him with murder in her eyes every time he laughs at one of Bass’ stupid jokes, or they brush shoulders as they walk, a shade too intimate for enemies.  He’s tried explaining what they are to each other  - Bass, who turned himself into a President, just because Miles asked; the sweet guy who became a monster just to follow him down, the man who loved everything he hated about himself - but he’s accepted it now.

She can only see Monroe, the dictator. The sociopath, crying what she is sure are crocodile tears.  Miles knows different, and it eats at him like a wound, but it’s better this way.  No matter how much he wants to fall right back into Bass, Charlie’s here to remind him he can’t.  He shouldn’t, because of what Bass has done to their family.  

She’d probably argue he already has, but he knows different.  This thing they’re doing – it’s just sex.  Fucking.  As necessary as breathing but far less meaningful. It’s not what he really wants to do, it’s not going all in, surrendering, giving himself back to that wild madness he’s only ever known with Bass.  It terrifies him, how much he wants it, but - he made a promise.  Promises, in fact.

He told Rachel he’d keep Charlie safe.  Promised Charlie he wouldn’t leave her.  Shame those two halves don’t equal a whole.

He and Bass built a fucking empire together.  They didn’t just practise the art of war - they made it their masterpiece.  They rolled roughshod over thousands of innocent people, and became so debauched, so lost in their decadence they failed to notice their empire falling apart. Failed to see that **they** were falling apart. They were not safe, for each other, from each other… definitely not for those who just so happened to get caught in blast radius of their explosions.

They still aren’t, not for themselves and especially not for Charlie.

_Safe? There’s no such thing as safe.  Only ignorant, and blind._

The voice again, the coldest thing he’s ever heard, a dagger of pure ice that carves out his heart as she coos in his ear.  He shudders, confused by the strange mix of longing and revulsion, how it evokes a face so beautiful that it can’t be real.  How, he groans, it sounds like how it might feel to have your cock sucked while someone flays your back. And that better not be an actual memory because this bitch fucking **terrifies** him.

Who is she? And how the hell is she in his head?   Just a fucked up figment of your imagination, he tells himself, but too late, too late, he’s frozen, bones grinding and cracking like glacier ice as he runs, runs, runs.  Towards them, his warmth, his light.  He has to save them, Bass and Charlie.  He needs them. Even if he’s the last thing they need.

You and me, Miles, you and me, Bass vows over and over, a beloved, agonising murmur that grows colder and colder until his throat is raw with wanting to scream.

“It’s not just us anymore,” he mutters, trying to open his eyes.  “It’s not just us.”

“Charlie,” he moans, fighting harder, but reality is a morass of doubt, and there are too many devil’s bargains that haunt him.  And the cold.  He’s so cold lately, his heart a frozen lump in his chest, blood a chilly river in his veins, even in the sweltering heat of the Midwest in July.  It makes him weak, he despairs.  Vulnerable. Charlie flits close and he basks in her warmth; Bass hovers over him and burns like the sun. He wants to crawl inside their endless summer, let it warm him from the inside out, let them thaw all the places that are numb with cold.

He wants to burn, and his filthy fucking imagination keeps whispering all the ways that could happen, the things they could do, how sweet it would be …

“No,” he moans.  “No.”

He’s already turned his back on the past - or maybe, turned back to the past - to let Bass warm him, but there’s a line in the sand even he won’t cross.  She’s his niece.  He loves her. He won’t use her like that. Not Charlie.

_We’ll see._

Miles thrashes, swinging wildly in his dream, grasping and reaching but nothing, there’s nothing there and he’s running again and she’s laughing, so amused by him, powerless, wretched, clutching at something so simple and expecting it to save him. He succumbs, the chill that Bass had momentarily managed to chase away claiming him once more, something heavy sitting on his shoulders, weighing him down even as it makes his blood sing with power.  

He tastes a primordial tang -  iron, blood, metal, he’s not sure which, but it doesn’t matter because power is surging through him, in him, out of him. A pentagram sears itself across the sky, burns behind his eyes, scrawls its ownership across his soul.  He gazes up in awe - this brand is as inescapable and concrete as the marks they once burnt onto the arms of their recruits, but there’s no inherent ugliness in it, no terror.  Just truth.  He knows that in his bones, even as the rest of it veers into insanity, flesh rending and blood dripping and the staff, solid in his hand, helping calm his fury into focus, erupting into actual fire.

_That’s what it does, moron.  That’s what **you** do._

Miles chokes because it’s his voice but it isn’t him. But it isn’t her either, whoever his ice-lady is.  Fuck. Does he have a whole peanut gallery up there? Has he tipped over into downright crazy, what with the horse-sized dogs and the monsters and all the other weird shit? And him, running, running forever, stopping only to tear and bite and destroy, blood on his tongue and the earth under his paws and hunting, hunting, always on the hunt ...

Who the fuck is he?   **What** is he? 

Because these dreams feel as real as a dagger in his gut, or a stone, pressing him down. Are they trying to trap him, or call him back?  They hit him like that terrible moment when you cease to be drunk and the nice, blurry, world slides back into focus: terrifying and grim just as your hangover descends.  It’s got its talons into you, merciless, and you just want to be back there, drunk, doing a reasonable facsimile of happy.  So you take another drink.

Trouble is, what’s real and what’s not?  What’s drunk, and what’s sober?

 _Binaries_. _You always do try to force the world into them, my knight… But it resists._

Her mocking laughter slams him back into an old sleeping bag in a tattered tent in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, shaking with adrenaline but pathetically grateful to be away from the monster dogs and the surging power and the mad peals of laughter that leave him frozen and flayed.  Her words, though.  They linger.  What had she called him? Her knight?

Like anyone would ever think of him as a something like that. Noble he’s not.

(Charlie did once. He can’t help remembering.  She showed up in Chicago and gazed up at him like she expected him to be her saviour.  A hero. It had frustrated him, then infuriated him when he realised he was actually going to try, but in the end he’d wanted it… even though it was impossible. Even though he knew he’d let her down.)

The sleeping bag is rank with his own fear and the rotgut he’s been sweating out since anaesthetising himself to sleep last night.  Gotta be why he’s having such weird dreams, so much blood and death and pain and those voices, calling him, begging for his help, cursing him.  Somehow, he knows it’s him they need, even when they call him something else.  Harry, sometimes, and Dresden.  Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, someone sings.

Clearly they’ve got the wrong guy, Miles hyperventilates.  If they knew - his need to make it stop, to help those poor suckers, to make things right is gunning for a showdown with the part of him that wants to slurp up the chaos and destruction, glory in it, bask in the power to to bend the whole world to his will.

The Butcher, he reminds himself.  That’s the Butcher, who’s back in bed with the Scourge.  Maybe it’s not the booze after all.  Maybe it’s his subconscious, screaming.  They’re dreams - sick, twisted dreams, but still just dreams.

But as much sense as that makes, as rational as it sounds … he knows the taste of his own lies.  He’s been marinating in them for decades now.

I can kill Monroe.  (I love you, Nora.)

I’ll take care of her.  (I love you, Rachel.)

I can kill Monroe.  (It’ll be okay, Charlie.)

And yet here he is, Bass curled against his back, a warm hand rubbing up and down his spine, the other covering his heart.  His own duplicity will still be choking him when that hand moves lower, strokes him into fullness, makes him forget. They’ll fall right back into each other, the atrocities of the past six, seven, eight years lost to merciful amnesia of hot, raw, dirty sex.  It has always been this way, always will be.

Even on the day he and Bass had locked eyes over Charlie’s head and he’d wondered if he might actually be able to pull the trigger this time, in his heart, he’d known that.  

You’re not family. (I don’t love you, Bass.)   

So many lies.

Telling himself that he didn’t give a damn **who** the wide eyed blonde looking for Miles Matheson was, since he was never going to be Miles again.  That he wasn’t coming. That they’d get Danny back.  That he wouldn’t flinch, not this time.  He would end Sebastian Monroe.   **Could** end Sebastian Monroe.  

The truth is this: Miles Matheson, killer, drunk on sex and his conscience screaming a little less with every pass of that too familiar hand. Miles Matheson, general, leading them all to their doom, one he’s accepted, as long as they bring the enemy down with them.  Miles Matheson, liar.  (Catamite? Faggot?  What would his father have said?  What **did** his father say about him and Bass anyway? They’ve known each other all their lives, so why can’t he remember?)

“You’ve been having more of those weird dreams again,” Bass murmurs into the back of his neck, the heat of his breath against the sensitive skin like being branded all over again. “Something up, Miles?”

“Bad batch of moonshine, maybe.”

He knows one surefire way to chase away the sourness of his own bullshit, and he can feel a half-hard cock already nuzzling between his legs.  He covers Bass’ hand with his own, then guides it downwards, grunting in satisfaction as Bass encloses him in a tight, unforgiving fist and starts to jerk.

Bass’ breath is hot against his skin, so fucking arousing that Miles doesn’t need to focus on anything other than his hand and his warmth, and the way his cock rubs against Miles’ balls every time he grinds his hips around in that clever circle. Bass nips at his ear, free hand fisted into his hair, and the one on his cock tighter, and faster, and tighter, and fuck - faster …

Slow, he wants to say.  Missed this so much. Missed **you** so much.  And it’s the truth, the only truth between them because God knows everything else got tangled and twisted in the wreckage of their two-bit empire.  But this, this is as close as he gets:  the bolt of pure need that explodes his spine as Bass sinks his teeth deep into the flesh of his bicep, sparking every nerve in his body and shoving him from warm-at-last towards total immolation.  But if he burns up, if there’s nothing left but ashes ...

Miles windmills himself away from the fire, gulps down air, gropes for control. What he wants, what he **really** wants is to push Bass over onto his front and open him up slow.  To sink into his ass inch by scorching inch. He’d speed up then, make Bass sob and beg him to go harder, faster the way he always does, and they’d end up fucking so glorious the whole world would explode into white-hot oblivion.

He wants that, needs it so bad he can practically taste it, but the small shred of resistance becomes a beachhead for common sense.   If he gives in, they’ll be useless for hours yet. There’s already watery light filtering through flimsy sides of the tent, dawn a good hour behind them.  Charlie will be back with breakfast soon, and at least one of them needs to cling to the illusion that good old Uncle Miles knows right from wrong and isn’t fucking the enemy stupid.  

(Him.  He’s the one clinging to that because Charlie is ridiculously fucking observant. Notices everything, that kid.)

Kid, he reminds himself.  She’s the kid, and Bass is the untrustworthy shit they’re putting up with because the enemy of my enemy is …. Well. Not my friend.  Can’t be that, never again.

There was a time when things could have been different. Before.  Before they’d tumbled headfirst into every self-destructive idea they stumbled across. Before the Republic and the botched assassination attempts. Before they’d become the monsters they’d always had the potential to be.  But we did, Miles flagellates himself. I did, and then he went further than I ever imagined.  He blew right past me on that highway to hell.

He chose to become my enemy, he reminds himself as Bass presses closer.  There’s no one left alive to testify otherwise - between them, they’ve slaughtered them all.

Miles is grateful for the rush of bitterness, followed by a vicious, swirling anger he grabs like a life preserver.  But he’s still dangling off the precipice of ridiculously fucking aroused, and the state he’s in - it just twists it. Adds a layer of nasty that makes him want to weep for his blackened soul. But his libido has no patience for tears - maybe, it growls, he could knock Bass around a bit, and sell it as the kind of shit that happens in war.  Good old rape as social control. Charlie might even buy it - it’d be worth it, to peel the scales off her eyes.  Let her see the kind of man she’d set up for her hero.  He’d warned her he wasn’t one of the good guys.

He wonders if it comes with the Matheson talent for violence, sometimes.  It’s a compulsion, this weird push-pull, this need to fuck someone up and make them beg for more, on the battlefield, in bed, wherever.  To use your body as weapon it was meant to be, to subjugate and dominate, to fight and fuck and win. Even when it was love - and this wasn’t love, it couldn’t be, not anymore, never again - the soft and loving things shriveled in the face of something darker. Subjugation.  Ownership. Humiliation, sometimes.  No matter how much Bass begged for it, taunted him into it, came his brains out … that’s not why Miles did it.  Needed it.

Is that any better? It’s not, even as he glories in it, he knows it’s not.  Sex for violence as opposed to violence for sex.  That isn’t something he should be selling her.  He shouldn’t be selling her any of this. He shouldn’t even be thinking about her, not now, not while Bass is stroking between his thighs, practically thrusting, mouth open in a wet, desperate gape against the back of his neck, begging, willing to do anything, anything …

Focus.  He forces away the sick imaginings, but keeps the edge he knows Bass enjoys.

“Sun’s getting high.  Haven’t got much time,” he growls, hands rough and reckless as they ignite a thousand fires with seeming obliviousness.

Bass groans and ruts against him even harder. “For?”

Miles reaches blindly around to dance his fingers over Bass in a merciless tease.  “A real fuck.  Charlie’s due back soon.”

Bass stiffens in his hand and Miles has to quell the urge to punch him.  Bets on his instincts instead.  “I guess I could suck you off when she’s starts banging the pots and pans, so you don’t have to keep quiet. You wouldn’t want her to hear you beg like a little bitch, would you?”  

Bass doesn’t say a word - doesn’t even breathe -  his every muscle primed for sudden flight. Does he think I’d kill him, just for thinking about her? Will I? Is she the one who will finally break us?  Or am I hoping she’ll save us?  

Because there’s a suspicion that’s been niggling at him since Bass and Charlie turned up together in Willoughby, all piss and vinegar but flowing together like water when it counted. Charlie hated Monroe's guts, but she chews on her lip when she watches at him, and Miles has a pretty good idea what that means.  And Bass always did have a thing for hot blondes who’d stab him as soon as look at him.  Maybe this is the price he has to pay for turning his sweet, earnest niece into the sort of avenging angel Bass could never resist.  

(So maybe he likes them like that too.  Doesn't have to mean anything.)

Miles loses his restraint. He wants to consume Bass, to devour him whole, to punish him for daring to think about his Charlie.  To bite the taste of her from his lips, to beat him so bloody he forgets the feel of her skin.  Never mind it hasn’t actually happened. Never mind that he’s the one imagining it.

He twists around to pin Bass on his back, one hand anchoring him in place as the other reclaims his cock.  “Slut,” he growls, not sure who to.

Bass, surely, and this wicked voice in his head, but not, not ...

He pumps his hand down around Bass’ proud erection, batting away the images his brain keeps cooking up: Charlie’s long golden hair, trailing over Bass’ skin as she works him over, the perfect globes of her ass raised high as she leans down to steal a kiss, slow and wet and her whole body undulating with it, knees spreading wide, begging …

“Pretty, pretty little slut, begging for me to fuck you.”

Bass grunts, pressing up against Miles’ restraint, the head of his cock leaking. Miles swipes it with his thumb before reaching up and shoving that thumb into Bass’ mouth, making him taste his own desperation.

“Cockslut,” Miles hisses, moving his hand back to grip Bass’ cock harder than could possibly be comfortable. This man was President, once.  This man was a tyrant who ran the most ruthless Republic of them all.  Now all he can do is whimper, arching his hips up like an eager whore, all golden curls and tempting angles, willing to do anything for his touch. "Want my mouth? Bad luck.  You're gonna paint the fucking ceiling for me.  Then maybe I'll make you lick it all up.  Cumslut."

"Yeah, Miles, yeah.  Please Miles," Bass begs, and God, he loves it when Bass gets like that, so far gone.  Miles can’t help but accept the offer, groaning his surrender before renewing his assault, teasing him with a swipe of his tongue, but refusing to take him into his mouth (though he wants to.  How he fucking wants to.)  Instead, he jerks him so hard and fast Bass practically levitates off the bedroll until his body surrenders to the need to follow orders, every muscle drawing up as he releases with a hoarse yell, shooting a fountain of cum towards the roof of the tent.

Bass can’t speak after, just flops back onto the sleeping bag gasping, and Miles finds himself staring up at the ceiling of the tent, his enjoyment of the moment suddenly nowhere to be found.  Bass curls into him, and he turns away, cold. 

What has he done? 

His cock has gone utterly limp, and he feels dirty.  Soiled.  More so than usual, he admits, more than just fucking the enemy and getting off on the fight and more than all the blood on his hands.  Charlie, he thinks.  He shouldn’t have thought about her, let alone let that thought translate into … whatever the hell that was.

“Well good morning to you too,” Bass says eventually, and Miles knows he should lean in and kiss him slow, an apology for the hasty, greedy excuse for a handjob and the cold shoulder that followed.  Knows he’s punishing Bass for giving him a good look at his own fucking demons, and being a little too keen to help him feed them.

The words taste bitter on his tongue, too bitter to manage.  He withdraws further, batting away Bass’ hand, ignoring the hurt on his face before he turns away. Miles sits up, curling in on himself, hugging his knees to his chest, receding inward.  All of the pleasure has soured, making his stomach turn.  He should never have let it get this far, not again.

He’s wallowing so deep in guilt that, he doesn’t hear the footsteps until the beast is almost nose to nose with him.  There have to have been noticeable footsteps, his poor, astonished brain insists.  Must have been.  ‘Cause he’s awake now, and it’s a fucking monster of a thing.

A dog, in fact. A monster dog: the one from his dream.

He’s stuck in a cave man moment, scrabbling to choose between fight and flight, all the while castigating himself for letting this happen in the first place. He should know better than to let his guard down … in the open like this. Will there be anything left of them for Charlie to find?

Then the thing opens its mouth and… licks his face? That can’t be right. Wild dogs have become a real problem in the years since the Blackout, roaming in feral packs and hunting whatever they think they can take down.

This dog though, it’s looking down at him with soft affectionate eyes, bathing his face in slobber with an oversized pink tongue.  Not a monster, some part of him thinks, Mouse.  He’s not sure where that word comes from, it doesn't fit the creature at all and somehow just thinking the name sends pain searing into his skull.  It has the sweet ring of truth though, somehow, even though he’s not sure why.

So he says it out loud.

“Mouse.”

It comes out softer than he intended and the dog licks him again, tail wagging wildly.  He tangles his hand in the soft hair between the massive shoulders, unsure whether he is pushing it away or hugging the damn thing.  Probably the latter, the unfamiliar warmth spreading in his chest tells him.  This is his dog.  His friend.

His Mouse.

He chuckles at the absurdity of it, and Bass rolls over to lift an eyebrow at the unexpected  mirth.

“Holy fuck!  What the --”  

The joy cackles out of him, his throat aching with it, the sight of Bass backpedalling to get away from the huge, shaggy dog somehow the funniest thing he’s ever seen.  It’s been years, he thinks, since he last laughed.

 _Miles Matheson doesn’t, you know_.

He stops laughing immediately, looking about for the wry voice.  The dog cocks its head and looks at him with long suffering eyes.

No.  Fuck, no.

_Really, Harry?_

Inside his head.

A dog is talking to him - inside his head.

He really has lost it.

 _No, that would be the ten years you spent slaughtering people who didn’t deserve it_ , Mouse observes acidly.   _Wake up, Harry._

“My name is Miles!” he snaps back before he can evaluate the wisdom of talking to an oversized walking carpet.

_Yeah? Ya think?_

Not only does his dog talk, he talks like a Chicago mobster, Miles thinks resignedly. He doesn’t even attempt to fight the certainty that this is **his** dog.  Then movement flickers behind him, the smell of gun oil registering in the moment before he flings himself across Bass.

“Don’t, Bass.  It’s okay,” he grunts, grabbing the barrel of the handgun and forcing it skyward. Better another hole in the canvas than losing another friend.  “It’s ---” he has no way of explaining, he realises.  No words that fit.

“It’s a giant fucking dog!  That was trying to eat you!” Bass squawks, but surrenders the gun with a minimum of protest. “Miles!”

He flicks the safety back on and tucks the gun back under the pallet with one hand, the other wrapping around Bass’ gun hand, just to be sure.  “He’s a friend,” he shrugs, knowing it shouldn’t be enough.

For Bass, it always is.  He still freezes when Mouse whines an apology and retreats until only his head is in their tent, warm eyes locked on their faces.

_You still like the trigger happy ones, I see._

“Fuck off, Mouse,” he grumbles, and pushes the dog fully outside with his foot.  The familiarity of it cascades over him in a shower of feeling.  He’s done this before.

He has no memory of it, no memory of ever having a dog let alone a shaggy behemoth, but he has done this before.

Someone laughs, far away. Not the frosty laughter from before, something warm and welcoming, like sunshine in audio form. His dream, he realises.  A tiny blonde woman, giggling, her body wet and welcoming even as they push Mouse out the door.

“Harry,” she moans, and Miles Matheson glories in it, her honest desire, her incandescent goodness.

“Karrin,” he murmurs, even as he turns away from her and the gentle warmth of his love pulsing through him to lose himself in the open flames of Bass Monroe, blasting away his confusion by going on the attack.

His predatory urges come crashing back, twice as strong. He takes that kiss now, brutal rather than loving, then drags his mouth south to capture a flat, male nipple.  He toys with it, circling it with his tongue and sucking it to sensitivity before catching it between his teeth and biting down.   The howl of pain tugs Miles firmly into the now, obscuring the memory with the dark rush of lust that pulses up from his belly, reinvigorating his cock.  Every bite, every filthy suggestion he drops into Bass’ ear takes him one step further away, until he can dismiss it, lose it, drown it.

Dreams aren’t real. Dogs can’t talk. I am Miles Matheson, he thinks, and slithers up Bass’ body to torture him a little more.

*

“Harry,” Karrin moans, her head fuzzy.  “Harry!”

She shakes off the hand on her shoulder and sinks into the dream, heart pounding as his mouth ravages hers, bites at her lips, drags south through the sensitive prickle of her beard, cock grinding against her own, rough and primal, voice rasping like she’s never heard, threats, promises, wicked, wicked things …

And his fingers are rough and careless as they close around her cock, and there’s pain, pain before pleasure but _fuck, Miles, fuck._  And she’ll do anything, anything, just as long as he doesn’t stop, just as long as she has this, has him, Miles, **Miles**.

“Karrin. Karrin, wake up!”

Molly’s worried face peers down into her own, green eyes huge and searching. Were they always so vibrant? Karrin doesn’t think so, just like she’s pretty sure that her cheekbones weren’t so sharp and her skin didn’t used to literally glow.  Maybe it’s just the place, a trick of the Nevernever. The opalescent glow of the room frames her vivid beauty, and, half asleep, it’s impossible not to reach up and tangle a hand in the colourful fall of her hair, lust still pounding in her veins, clouding her mind.

“Karrin? You were yelling.  About someone called Miles.”

Miles.  Fuck me, Miles.  Now, please Miles, please!

Karrin blinks, then feels the heat of her blush spread across her face as the dream recedes and she works her hand free of Molly’s hair .  She - he - she …

“A dream.  It was just a dream.  I don’t even know anyone called Miles.”

But you do, something inside her whispers,  You do.  Her body throbs, still vibrating for him.  Remembering.  That voice, rasping in her ear.  That long body, just as bony as it ever was.  The darkness, violence and power and lust, just waiting to gobble her up.

“You had a dream?  What of?”

“Harry?” she whimpers, terrified she’s just making it up.  Fantasising.  

Molly gasps, unable to keep the yearning from her face.   “Where was he?”

“Lost.  He’s so lost, Molly.  So ---”

Not Harry, Karrin realises.  Someone else.  

Someone darker and more terrifying than Harry Dresden had ever aspired to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Please take a moment to comment - we'd love your thoughts, questions, incredulities, objections. It's all fuel for the writing process.


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